Nihonto Club

Ever wondered if one day you could just:

• search your favourite trusted sword related sites for information about some smith or school?
• get a list or an RSS feed of all Nhonto articles published this week?
• look at new items available for sale today from your trusted dealers on one page?
• Get notified when Kotetsu is for sale again from Aoi Art (or any other seller)?

All this is possible with modern technologies. In fact, I have most of it up and running since Christmas on my home server. Have a quick look here:

A web crawler is running at designated times through a set of well-known Nihonto related sites, and results are available through Multisite search within NihontoClub. It also covers Nihonto Club site itself, providing much higher quality searching facilities (let's be honest, NC built-in search isn't great - it doesn't even recognise word variations). You may see how many times the phrase was found on each of the targeted seb sites, filter by site, etc (see the screenshot).

There's one downside: it needs more power. In order to make it usable just for one person, I'd need almost twice as powerful web hosting (which means higher running costs).

I'm working on a fully automated version now, which will be available some time before the end of the year (sorry folks, too many real life committments) and it's going to be hosted on my home server with free access from the main website. It won't be fast, there may be downtime, but I hope you may find it useful.